Loretta of the Lamp - The Fallout

Masters of our own fate

For Loretta it was a week of waking nightmares, as if her life in the last few months hadn't been that already, this was much worse. Every time she woke, left her room, turned a corner in the hall, or looked up from the plate of food she had been served, she expected to be confronted by the Sultan. The littlest things had begun to make her jump. Small movements out of the corner of her vision, children shouting in the corridors, a knock at her door, the breeze when it moved the curtains. There was a sad and lonely voice inside her that told her she would live as this miserable little fear-creature for what was left of her life, be it long and painful, or mercifully short. There was a dark patch in all of her thoughts, which she tried to regulate to as few as possible. Daydreams and wistful thoughts had no place, so too thoughts that gave consideration to the reality of her situation, they were all being eaten away by the darkness as it grew on her mind.

There were times when she lay awake in the quietest hour of night that she began to feel around the edges of that darkness, to consider the actions that would lead to the reality of the will to die that she had threatened in hot anger, and she knew she was right, the Sultan, ultimately, did not have control over her life.

Loretta had always been in control.

Hope had ceased to be a thought. There was no hope Loretta could play with in her mind, and the memories of Akil she sternly forced away at any moment that they chose to surface. Hope of escape was not possible, she was watched at every turn and every breath she made was counted, checked off in secret by those who watched her and waited.

But if hope was no longer a thought, it was still an object. A dark, morbid hope, of vengeance and desperation. Loretta carried the little fruit knife with her everywhere she went now, tucked into the lining of her dress.

That one morning with the cactus fruit must have been providence, for the knives were never offered to her ever again. She hoped it was because they felt she was dangerous, but none of the other girls were given knives either.

But here was hope, in the little knife. And with it, Sameh began to train her to fight. He would wake her, if she had managed to fall into a state of sleep, at an hour of the morning when everyone was silent and only the cats in the palace remained awake. They would leave her bedroom locked from the inside, which was the way Loretta always slept, and they would leave by the little courtyard and through the gap that Sameh had used to bring her back on the night of the banquet. The forgotten courtyard where the timber and tiles were stored became her training ground where she learned to fight.

With nothing much else to do during the day than eat and behave herself, she put all her energy into the night and learning to fight.

Sameh had been stern with her on the first few nights, telling her off for being much too loud, and much too angry in the way she struck out and attempted to defend herself when he instructed her to do so. He taught her the same routines he had been put through as a child to learn focus and build strength, and Loretta was begrudgingly glad of it because she knew she was beginning to put on weight with nothing much else to do in the harem than eat and babysit the Sultan's children.

It had only been when she begun to look after the children that Loretta realised she was speaking Arabic. She had not even remotely considered herself to be speaking a language other than English since she had come of out the lamp, but the truth was that whatever era of Morocco she had been brought into, there was not a chance that English was the language of common communication in the Sultan's harem. Confusingly so, she began to consider that English had not been the language spoken inside the lamp either, nor had it likely been the language she had communicated with Akil in at any point. Being in the lamp had changed her, she recognised that, but she began to wonder how much? And why? And how?